Money market rates in China climbed again last week, prompting more worries of a deja vu of June’s cash crunch that spooked global markets. That was when the Shibor—the Shanghai interbank offering rate, which tracks the interest rates banks charge each other—soared, reminding many of the Libor leap that happened just before Lehman’s demise in 2008.

The likely cause is that the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) declined to inject funds into the interbank market for a third time in a row Friday. Cash will get even scarcer this week, when banks move cash back onto their balance sheets to meet reserve ratio requirements. For that reason, the PBOC will likely open its tills on Tuesday, soothing the Shibor once again.

The Shibor is useful, says Patrick Chovanec, chief strategist at Silvercrest Asset Management, “because it’s the part of the iceberg that we can see.” Below the surface, however, are far more alarming signs of the state of China’s economy, according to a recent note by Anne Stevenson-Yang of J Capital Research in Beijing. What her research reveals about the source of China’s liquidity suggests that, regardless of China’s 7.8 percent Q3 GDP growth, a Lehman-like bank failure is more likely than ever.

First off, bank deposits, which form the lending base for banks, are growing at a slower and slower clip. That’s largely because the government sets those rates artificially low, households are now shifting funds into high-yield wealth management products (WMPs) and other products that make up China’s shadow finance system—credit channels that exist off bank balance sheets and beyond regulator oversight.

Loan officers are now working overtime to meet quotas for deposits, not loans, says J Capital. When they can, they pass on this work to companies hard-up for credit, requiring them to find depositors willing to put enough of their money in the bank to cover the amount of the loan they need. To lure depositors, the borrowing company offers to pay interest directly to depositors, which supplements the government-mandated 3.5 percent rate the bank pays on deposits. Depositors therefore reap up to 8 percent yield—way higher than the measly 3.5 percent for the deposit. This is so widespread that it’s given rise to a specialist trade in “deposit farming”—i.e. brokering depositor recruitment—which has cropped up on street corners around China, reports J Capital.

​This chart shows the difference between M2, a measure of cash that includes some types of “quasi-money,” and bank deposits.

If deposits are so scarce, how have banks been able to pass the audits at the end of each month, which is when they must meet reserve requirement ratios? By using “quasi-money”—fairly liquid financing instruments that include wealth management products which securitize off-balance-sheet lending, and discounted bank acceptance notes. The latter is a promise of a future payment; businesses can cash them in at a discount before the payment is due. Through repurchase agreements with other banks, they can be wiped off bank books while boosting a bank’s deposits.

Nearly three-quarters of deposits are now made up of this “shadow currency,” according to J Capital research, as quasi-money creation has expanded faster than growth in deposits. That creation is happening without even the pretense of having a claim of a future payment. One bank manager in Hebei province told J Capital that it printed bank acceptances “on demand” for a local government finance vehicle (LGFV) whenever the platform needed to pay existing loans.

Banks that are lower on the finance food chain—smaller ones that don’t enjoy state backing—are profiting as middlemen in this trade. A source close to the banking industry in China said that 40 percent of the profits of a Hong Kong-listed commercial bank now come from brokering the brisk trade in bank acceptance notes.

We recently discussed Société Générale’s estimate that 39 percent of China’s GDP—or around $3.4 trillion—is going toward old debts. That roughly squares with J Capital’s calculation that 60 percent of new credit is being used to pay off old loans, and as much as 80 percent in some regions.

This is happening for a couple of reasons. Contrary to China’s recent economic data, growth is foundering. In interviews and surveys, business managers are “absolutely blunt about how national statistics obscure the reality before them,” says Stevenson-Yang. As a result, revenue is falling even in sectors that haven’t traditionally been hooked on credit.

But while companies in those sectors are cutting costs and liquidating assets to pay down loans, state-owned companies and LGFVs are piling on more debt. Because everyone assumes that the central government guarantees their loans, they have “infinite demand for credit,” says Silvercrest’s Chovanec, and will spend what they have to to hit growth targets. That’s especially true for infrastructure projects at the local level, he adds.

Despite this grim outlook, Shibor’s latest lurch will probably only be temporary. What it shows, however, is how sensitive China’s financial system is to even the slightest hiccup in cash creation. That means if the government cracks down aggressively on the shadow currency trade, consequences would be dire.

Of course, something has to give eventually. J Capital’s Stevenson-Yang sees two ways this might happen. “The economy is either going to skid into a long period of no growth,” she said, or a bank will fail, accompanied by an economic crisis. But it’s futile to try to guess when the latter will happen, she says. “You just can’t time these things. The whole point of the system is that they control the visible signs because it matters a lot that the banks not be looking like they’re failing.”

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Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

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President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.